Novato, Calif. – July 27, 2006 – Scene7®, the leading rich media platform provider, today announced that Ulla Popken (www.ullapopken.com), a leading marketer of women’s plus size apparel in North America, has increased average order size and grown online revenues after deploying Scene7’s rich media technology integrated with DMinSite’s Mercury 6.0 eCommerce platform.

Ulla Popken sells fine quality apparel through direct mail catalogs, its eCommerce site and specialty retailers. Its merchandise has many detailed features and fabric characteristics that were not easily viewed in its print catalogs or from static enlarge functionality on its site. Additionally, Ulla Popken has hundreds and hundreds of products that it wanted to show in the different colors available, but shooting every item in every color on location with live models was time consuming and costly. Looking to enhance its customer online shopping experience as well as grow sales and conversions, Ulla Popken relaunched its retail site including a complete user interface redesign and replatform working with DMinSite, leveraging DMinSite’s Mercury 6.0 eCommerce platform and Scene7’s on-demand rich media platform.

DMinSite’s eCommerce platform, has been one of the industry leaders for applying classic direct marketing principles to the online world. Its Mercury 6.0 eCommerce platform is its newest software designed to allow mail order catalog companies to accelerate online sales. The Mercury 6.0 solution offers admin-controlled A/B split testing of any page on the site which significantly lowers the time, energy and money required to test different site features, layouts and functionality. The Mercury 6.0 solution also separates the graphical elements of a site from the underlying business logic, giving companies full control of their look and feel through their back-office administration enabling catalogers to change the color palette and graphic elements to match seasonal or merchandising changes.

Scene7’s On-Demand platform offers an all-inclusive managed service where companies control the production and publishing of their own content and rich media. Scene7 On-Demand customers, like Ulla Popken, enjoy a complete solution to author, manage and seamlessly deploy rich media such as dynamic content serving, zoom, color change and alternate image views.

By implementing Scene7, Ulla Popken can automatically generate any number of image variations from single master images and image commands. Currently, 100 percent of Ulla Popken’s imagery across all site pages including home, category, product and shopping cart are dynamically served by Scene7 On-Demand. Dynamic content serving is the baseline that allows retailers like Ulla Popken, to easily expand their use of visual merchandising while adding rich interactivity to their shopping experience. Ulla Popken showcases its merchandise and every color option using lifestyle, on-model photography, providing critical visual information such as draping, length and proportions for its apparel shoppers. Scene7 changes color options on-the-fly, which allows Ulla Popken to avoid having to photograph every style in every color—a significant savings. Shoppers can view merchandise including all color options as well as zoom and pan on products to see the fine detailing that distinguishes the company’s apparel – all within one integrated viewer. Using Scene7’s back-office, Ulla Popken also sets its own merchandised zoom areas to guide shoppers to distinguishing features on every garment.

“With hundreds of products coming from different vendors and in different colors, it was important for us to stand apart from our competitors by visually showcasing the fabric and trim details that represent the value and quality of our apparel,” said Thomas Schneider, president of Ulla Popken. “Since adding Scene7 and upgrading to DMinSite Mercury 6.0, our site has increased conversion rates, decreased the number of customer service calls from shoppers seeking to clarify product colors and details and reduced the number of returns from our customers citing that the color and/or fabric was not what they were expecting.”

In addition to using Scene7 On-Demand to dynamically generate all size, color, and zoom imagery on its site, Ulla Popken uses Scene7’s self-serve eCatalogs to build multiple online catalogs each season. Scene7 eCatalog is the only end-to-end solution to dynamically serve, assemble, segment and personalize online catalogs.

Leveraging the same rich media technology and eCommerce platform as its consumer site, Ulla Popken also launched a new showroom site for its wholesale business. This site offers a tool for Ulla Popken’s sales reps to sell merchandise into channel and gives boutique shop owners purchasing Ulla Popken apparel the opportunity to view intricate details of products featured in the catalog. Boutique retailers can now order and re-order directly from Ulla Popken helping to shorten the selling cycle for its account reps. The site shares the same back-office administration as the consumer site but carries a different line of products and allows pricing to be applied based on log-in ID. The site also enables Ulla Popken to sell merchandise that may not have been featured in its wholesale print catalogs.

“Ulla Popken’s strategic, multi-channel approach is an excellent example of how rich media combined with a marketing driven eCommerce platform, can be utilized to successfully increase online sales in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer channels. Both end customers and channel partners benefit with significantly enhanced, convenient shopping experiences,” said Doug Mack, CEO of Scene7. “We look forward to working with Ulla Popken as it continues to grow and innovate.”

About DMinSite
DMinSite is a managed e-commerce partner specializing in catalog sales. Its key mission is to increase clients’ sales at a profit by providing them with continual innovation and marketing strategies. The company is headquartered in Covington, Ky., with an additional engineering office in Cupertino, Calif. Visit online at www.dminsite.com.